New on his blog Jani Hartikainen has posted a simple idea that you can take to make sure you're getting the most out of your Ajax/Zend Framework connections.

A common reason to use Ajax in a website is to make it feel faster, so you usually want Ajax requests be processed as quickly as possible. While there are many ways to speed up Zend Framework based applications, there are still some things like routing and dispatching which still add up to the total. There is, however, another way to make Ajax work even faster

Since Ajax requests don't usually require all of the complex routing and dispatching that a normal Zend Framework request might, he recommends creating a separate Ajax handler. His includes an example of a simple searching endpoint with a class handling the backend logic. A simple handler script loads up the bootstrap and makes the request for the search, returning the search results in a JSON format.